Kinda, Sorta, Wanna Cry

Generally speaking, I loathe equivocation which has become the style of spoken English. Listen to any "analyst" on a news show, and just count the number of times that persons says: "sort of". I've heard statistics quoted followed by that phrase, evident truths modified by it, prognostication brought low by its inclusion. Yet few people seem to notice it.

I'm much more decisive and opinionated than that.  I don't have time for a metaphorical existence where perhaps something is one way, perhaps another. I don't like to wiggle out from under my observational responsibility by lacking the back bone to call shit something simple like shit.

To date this has been helpful in dealing with cancer. Idiopathic and cruel, cancer isn't much impressed by equivocation, though to be honest it scoffs at decisiveness too, although I see that it respects it more. While one is trying to figure out how sort of cancer is, it's busy eating your bones, taking yummy nibbles at vital tissue or just low riding the body's highway looking to bulge out here or there.

I, though, have been standing in the doorway of Equivocation's hovel the past couple of weeks because that's where circumstance has left me.  A lymph node under my right arm is either inflamed with infection or hosting a growing tumor-- we don't know which yet. Normally, the waiting to find out wouldn't bother me--so why are we waiting? Still, there's pockets of infection in my lungs and we are trying to clear that out. I have another CT scan next week, and after, another sit down with Dayton. There is still about a week or two before I know.

In the meantime, I want to cry because my body has erupted into 24 hr pain, dull aches here, ephemeral bolts of it there, the right armpit screaming, the left one moaning, and much of the rest of me out of kilter. I have had a fairly easy time with pain as we've moved forward, and I've been grateful for that. Experiencing it as part of the moments of your day is an awful burden. And I feel burdened.

I'm on a pain patch, one that I requested be kept low, to keep me out of the zombie state to which I'm easily drawn on pain meds.  Even at low dose I have to watch my balance and my two fingered iPad typing is about impossible. I rarely drive anymore but I don't drive at all on this combo. I know better.

My hydrocodone has turned into a 24 hour a day reliever too, every six hours.  You'd think the combination would suffice, but I still feel it, burning pain, ache, dulled slightly further, a bolt. I kinda wanna cry.

I'm not big on crying. For me when I do, it's a full body experience and my nose runs like its A wet Spring on the Mississippi. I still have the men don't cry situation like a lead weight around my imagination. I was born in 1960, after all.

I want to cry because I fear that node is a new cancer that I have to fight, that I have to gin up my positivity and stomp reality away. I have to talk about making it to 70 while seeing that goal slip out of sight, and I have to deal with being ok about that, about fighting smarter and not blindly, about being rationally prepared for what might happen. This is a lot of work, I have to tear apart responses that served me well in the past and truly question if that rote response is enough to pull me through now. I don't think it is and that scares me; I need to be ready if I need to fight.

Then there's the thought that this is an infection, enabled by the pounding my system takes weekly, or pneumonia, or what have you. What if I've become too dramatic to see that this can be fought with the right antibiotic, a head screwed on tight, a bit of humor. Not everything that happens with cancer is life or death. Cancer, conscienceless and biologically predestined, simply obeys the idea of destruction. It is the very antithesis of kinda, sort of.

I'll be scared this week, I'll be in pain. Sleep will be interrupted, odd, deep at times with milky dreams  forgotten upon awakening. I'll deal because I have to, and then we'll see what we must do next.